I was looking through my cookbooks this week hoping to find something that would inspire me to make a fantastic dinner when I noticed The Vegetarian Epicure Book Two by Anna Thomas hiding away on a top shelf.

I was given this cookbook seven Christmases ago by my mother who remembered it from her own early cooking days. I had just dedicated myself to vegetarianism (as so many college students do) and was a little baffled as to how to arrange a meal with no meat in it. My mother assumed that this classic book of vegetarian cooking would help, but when I first glanced through the recipes they seemed terrible. The flavor combinations were way more adventurous than I was ready for and I was sure I would hate everything in it. The book soon went into storage for several years while I muddled along eating pasta with jarred tomato sauce and fake meat substitutes.

Eventually I moved into my first real apartment with its own little kitchen. While unpacking my things I rediscovered The Vegetarian Epicure Book Two. I was still unimpressed by it; unlike most of the cookbooks I admired this one had no glossy photos of carefully arranged dishes. It also had loads of writing in addition to the recipes. The big difference was: this time many of the recipes seemed tempting, even intriguing. I decided to try a few and found, to my delight, that they were delicious. I invited a few friends over for a small dinner party and they were equally impressed.

Now another four years have passed and I have once again rediscovered The Vegetarian Epicure Book Two. This time I needed no convincing. I know that they recipes are fantastic. In fact, it seems that the more mature my palate becomes the more wonderful the flavors in this cookbook become. This time though, I wanted to see what all that writing was about, the stuff I had managed to ignore for so many years.

It turns out that the writing in The Vegetarian Epicure Book Two is both charming and informative. There is an introduction that explains why she chose to write a second book and where the inspiration for the recipes came from. After that each section of the book begins when a few pages of writing about the general rules for the following types of recipes (how to keep a sauce from breaking, how to keep a soufflé from falling) and a few notes on how she came up with them and when she finds them most appropriate to make.

I’m not sure how old Anna Thomas was when she wrote the book, but a sense of playful youth pervades the writing. You really get a sense of how much fun she must have had traveling around Europe and tasting food. You can also feel the joy that she gets from cooking with friends and sharing her creations with them. For example, when writing about soup she states that “Sauerkraut Soup…was devised one chilly evening for a friend who had a stubborn craving for sauerkraut; we went down to the kitchen and got right to work, with whatever supplies were on hand. The result was wonderful.”

Anna Thomas also insists in almost every written section of her book (and within a few of the recipes) that only the freshest, highest quality ingredients should be used in cooking. “There is only one rule that must never, under any circumstances, be broken: Don’t try to prepare something if you can’t, for any reason, procure the highest quality ingredients for it.” As a person who runs a blog on local, seasonal cooking I find her attitude incredibly agreeable. Here is an excerpt from the Menu section of her book, “Then consider what is in season. There’s nothing like seven or eight months’ deprivation to when the appetite for crisp stalks of asparagus in the spring or ripe, golden pumpkins and roasted chestnuts in autumn. Whatever you idea, seasonal planning is a surefire way to proceed.”

As for the recipes, I continue to be happily astonished by them. Real butter and heavy cream add a fantastic richness to many of the recipes and there is no tofu that I have discovered, two of my biggest problems with standard vegetarian cookbooks.  Vegetarian cooking should taste just as flavorful, rich, and cultured as cooking with meat does and The Vegetarian Epicure Book Two shows how to do it.  How many fantastic recipes can you fit in one little book? How could I have ever thought they were bad? Here are a few of my favorites:

• · Dutch Cheese and Potato Soup
• · Clear Beet Borscht with Mushrooms
• · Potato and Zucchini Omelets
• · Insalatone (a marinade of cooked and raw vegetables)
• · Winter Vegetable Stew
• · White Bean Pate
• · Spaghetti e Cipolle
• · Pakoras
• · Hungarian Walnut Crepes

Hungry yet?